The badly-mauled Mughals got some respite on Friday when I popped over to Dusselfurt to attend the Third German Sim Awards. Held in a disused schnapps distillery and hosted by eighties balloon squanderer Nena the event proved just as predictable as last year. Of the 709 awards only three went to dark horses…

Against the odds, the statuette for Most Self-Controlled Developer was nabbed by the people behind troglodytic train sim World of Subways Vol 2. The committee felt they’d shown admirable restraint in not filling their beautiful Berlin tunnels with irradiated rats, undead commuters, or cryogenically frozen SS sturmtruppen (despite obviously wanting to):

The announcement that Gabelstapler Simulator 2009 rather than DCS: Black Shark, had won in the Most Realistic Vehicle category, almost started a riot.

Visual Imagination Software’s recreation of the Still RX 60 forklift is decent enough, but is it really better than Eagle Dynamics’ breathtaking Ka-50? Judge for yourself by downloading the German language demo, or save yourself the bother by reading the following word: no.

The last surprise of the evening came when local favourite Bagger Simulator lost out to an unknown Swedish title in the hotly contested Simulations of Diggy Things category. Bread rolls and beer bottles were hurled, but having played the Tenstar Simulator trial (which requires a gamepad) I can see where the judges were coming from.

I’m appalled by the apparent lack of homeless people trying to sell you lighters and newspapers, playing incredibly bad music or droning on about how they really hate to do this, but they’re homeless and have nothing to eat and no place to stay and if anybody would be so kind as to give them a little money, something to eat or maybe even a place to stay. There are also no hordes of drunken british or spanish people, no foul smelling punks and no party goers going or coming from some kind of afer- pre- or whatever hour.

I really want an explanation why people make this stuff. Get an interview or something with these guys.

Especially the World of Subways thing has got to be a very elaborate joke. It boggles the mind why anyone would want to play a train simulator that is completely underground. The description on the website says “The U7 is the longest subway in Berlin […]. It runs completely underground, crosses 5 districts and goes under the rivers Spree and Havel, as well as the Teltow- and Westhafencanal.”
They have to be joking, right? Why does the path of the route matter, if it is completely underground anyway? And what will the game be like? Will they tell you “Now you are under the district Berlin-Mitte. You could see all the famous sights if you weren’t underground.”
Seriously. Who comes up with this stuff?

Oh btw they did actually win an award (Serious Games Award 2009) this weekend.

World of Subways Vol 2 looks surprisingly pretty. However I would only play it if I was assured that running two trains directly at one another was possible, and that the resulting explosions were suitably shiny enough.

The thing that freaked me out about the subway sim was the people.
Why don’t they get on the train? They just stand there looking at it with their empty eyes, but never moving, why don’t they get on?
OMG THE EYES!

It’s actually DIE Sim Awards. While award, despite being an English word, is used in it’s masculine form, hence “der” as long as it’s singular, in this case it’s plural, and plural is always “die”, it doesn’t matter which gender.
I know, German is a weird language.

I know someone who’s bought that subway simulator. He also has a photo album on Flickr of every station on the Circle Line from a trip he went on a month or two back with a bunch of other total, total nerds. What I’m trying to say is that there is a small but totally dedicated bunch of people who will pay for this stuff, but that you probably wouldn’t want to talk to at a party.

I do think these things are more for training than pleasure though. Or maybe it is for the few workaholic forklift drivers who after a whole day of forklifting thinks “yay! finally I can go home and lift som virtual pallets.”

It would be cool with a hazmat level; can you move the stolen Russian nuke from the train to the bomb squad in time?

I would like to chime in and say that an interview with a developer would be very interesting and enlightening. If anything, I anticipate a theme reminiscent of that one piece Tim did an eon (aeon?) ago (looks like it was posted last year, in April) about making a faithful replication of the transatlantic crossing in a sim.

@Nicko: the title=”” parameter declares what mouse over text will be displayed if you hover the cursor over the link. In order to create a piece of text that acts as a link, you need to do the following: Start with a href=”yourlinkhere” title=”” then write the text you want to act as a link and then close the whole thing with /a.

You don’t need to use the title=”” parameter, if you don’t want any mouse over text displayed. Hope that helped.